Manage your subscription

Comment isn’t free: the downside of Web 2.0

Popular Science magazine's decision to kill online commenting should be the start of a wider discussion, says the social media researcher whose findings were one of the reasons for the magazine's move

By Dietram A. Scheufele

When Popular Science announced last month that it would no longer allow reader comments on its online articles, the science world was divided. Some celebrated the decision as an overdue measure to rein in vile virtual commentary. Others lamented it as giving up on Web 2.0’s early promise to create widespread public engagement.

The ensuing debate about whether Popular Science made the right call, however, missed the larger point&colon; what is the purpose of comment sections in the first place?

The simple answer is that more conversation is better than less. For the 19th-century political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, a keen observer of modern democracies, talk was the soul of democracy. Empirical social science has largely confirmed his intuitions. We know from decades of research that people who discuss scientific or political issues more frequently with those around them tend to be more knowledgeable about these topics and participate more in the political process.

Advertisement

This is particularly important for less well-understood issues, such as nanotechnology or synthetic biology. Commenting on and debating articles in media outlets may help those with little scientific training or pre-existing knowledge of a subject to make sense of what they have read, and allow them to make better policy choices.

There is a second mechanism that makes conversations among lay audiences important. Experimental and survey-based studies – including some of our own – have shown that the mere anticipation of having to talk to others about a topic can trigger more careful processing of the information. Routinely engaging with other readers in comment sections can therefore lead to more thoughtful engagement with the articles themselves.

All of this sounds positive, but there is a major caveat. People’s values and beliefs tend to shape their social environment. We tend to live in neighbourhoods that mirror our own ideological predispositions and demographics, and our virtual social networks on Facebook and Twitter are no different. As a result, we usually end up talking to people who are just like us. Social scientists often use the terms “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles” to describe this phenomenon.

Talking to people within echo chambers tends to limit the beneficial effects that conversations can have – including those on comment threads. In fact, research suggests that the most productive discussions are those that expose us to viewpoints different from our own (Journal of Communication, vol 56, p 728).

Franz Kafka once said that we should only read books that bite and sting us; social science proves him right. We are much more likely to explore all sides of an issue and carefully reason through alternatives if we have our viewpoints challenged.

Unfortunately, modern information environments provide less and less opportunity for that kind of open, reasonable debate and instead promote more and more reinforcement within ideologically homogenous echo chambers.

One of the few times we encounter alternative points of view is in the online comment sections of magazines, newspapers and websites. But most people are simply not used to this new communication environment, which allows people to call each other names, hide behind pseudonyms and post scathing responses without any follow-up. We would never engage in this kind of behaviour in a classroom or town hall meeting, with all the social barriers in place that have governed our face-to-face interactions for hundreds of years.

Of course, print media have never faced this dilemma because their comment sections have always been moderated. They are more commonly referred to as “letters to the editor”. To this day, letters are carefully screened and edited by editorial staff, and only a fraction ever make it to print.

Many observers hailed the arrival of Web 2.0 technologies as a new age for true public engagement. Readers, the theory went, would finally be able to directly exchange ideas with one another and with journalists in a genuinely open forum. As we know, it did not quite work out that way.

The editors of Popular Science therefore deserve credit for doing what few others have managed&colon; start a long overdue debate among scientists, media and audiences about how we communicate science in this new environment. Online debates – including the comment sections – need to be both heterogeneous in terms of the viewpoints they represent and civil in terms of the exchanges they produce.

Social science tells us that disagreement among citizens can ultimately produce good outcomes. But modern societies also need to learn how to express disagreement without the substance of the debate being drowned out by yelling and screaming – especially in science. Until we get to that point, Popular Science might just have made the right decision in putting a hold on online commenting and giving all of us a chance to debate this issue a bit more carefully.

Dietram A. Scheufele holds the John E. Ross Chair in Science Communication in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is honorary professor at the Institute for Communication Studies, Technical University of Dresden, Germany